"As if it led into absolute nothing," Bayard murmured. Brandon nodded. "As it well may, sir, what little I can make out."
He turned, regarding Bayard directly.
"Whatever it is," Bayard observed, "it becomes more dangerous by the hour. It is set here to waken the worm, on that I'd wager. But as to how it will do so I can only guess."
Enid took her husband's hand, as though she was about to guide him through unfathomable dark.
"Well, why in the name of the twenty-seven gods are we prissing here at the edge of this inch-deep chasm like a flock of embroiderers," thundered Sir Robert, "when we could see to our liking if one of us had the simple fortitude to take a closer look?"
And holding high a brightly glowing lantern, he stepped forward onto the footbridge, marching securely toward the sound ahead of him.
"Wait!" Bayard cried, reaching for the rash old man. But his leg gave beneath him and he started to fall, pulling Brandon with him. Sir Robert took ten steps, and fell suddenly from view as the rock gave way beneath him. Clutching the lantern, he tumbled in the dark like a small subterranean shooting star.
"Father!" Enid shouted and stepped to the rippling edge of the chasm.
"Be still, all of you!" Bayard cried out and, steadying himself against Brandon, grabbed for his wife and held her.
Behind them, Marigold trumpeted in dismay.
"Uncle Robert has vanished with my sausages!" she exclaimed. "If we are trapped, I'll starve!"
Icily Enid stared at her most distant cousin as all about them, the men flinched involuntarily.
'Then I can only suggest you lower yourself into whatever lies in front of us, Marigold," Enid said through teeth impossibly clenched, "and retrieve them, casings and gristle and all. And do try to rescue my father if you can find the time."
But Marigold had anticipated her. Already she was waist-deep in the chasm, lowering herself into the whirling darkness with the ungainly grace of a manatee. Soon the big girl had nearly vanished, complete with bag of cosmetics, as the lacquered ship of her hair sank into the murky country below them.
Sir Robert di Caela lay spread-eagled on a stone table, wondering how by all the gods it had managed to cushion his fall.
Even the light in the lantern was intact.
It was welcome to Robert, this sense of his life being spared. Instantly he felt younger-thirty or forty years younger, at least as young as he felt when, as a lean and dangerous swordsman, he traveled east from Solamnia, joining a band of Knights in the Khalkist Mountains, at a little pass called Chaktamir.
It was a feeling he had almost forgotten in the habits of his old age.
Robert breathed the gray mist eagerly. It was cool, harboring the clear blue smell of ozone and imminent water, as though, beyond all possibility, this chasm lay somewhere under the sea.
Was it a shipwreck around him? Robert squinted, struggled to his feet for a better view.
Above him there were shouts, as though all of his companions were speaking to him through blankets. Someone was descending. No doubt they were concerned for his well-being.
Which is better than it has been in decades, he thought with a smile.
About him, the landscape was littered with glass and barrel staves. A sour smell rose on the charged air, reminding him of centaurs, of singing.
What were the words of the song?
As hungry as a dwarf for gold, As centaurs for cheap wine.
It was a wine cellar, or the remnants of one. Robert waded slowly through the rubble. At first, he leaned against a broken-down wine rack. Slowly he examined himself for bruises or breakage. Shadows swirled above him, and a form descended through the tumbling dark until he could make out its girth and its shape and its absurd hair.
"Marigold!" he breathed in exasperation.
Robert felt his own ancient limbs. He was surprisingly intact. For a moment, he thought there might be some restoring magic to this cellar.
What seemed to have happened was that the cellar had dropped. From its previous site at the base of the Cat Tower, where a single flight of stairs had led from the light of the surface down no more than twenty feet to the finest wines in southern Solamnia, the cellar had tumbled, wine racks and barrels and all, into these depths.
Fragments of glass, covered with old wine, stuck to the soles of his boots. Nothing was intact here.
It must have fallen hundreds of feet, he thought. Almost by reflex, he looked above him, as if from this depth and this darkness, not to mention through the mist, he could see the walls of the cellar, left hanging when the floor dropped into the earth.
A clay pipe jutted from the floor beside him, rising out of sight into the darkness. But there, where pipe met floor and seemed to disappear into the rock, lay an enormous clay shield, gnomish letters inscribed on its circumference.
The well cap!" Robert exclaimed in delight. "The cellar must have fallen through onto the damned thing!"
The well cap was cracked and moldy. Water seeped from the crack, and beneath its strained surface, Robert could hear the rumble of the mighty well.
This is a chamber of miracles, he thought triumphantly. Now losing the castle papers rests more easily on these poor old shoulders.
He looked up toward Marigold-still descending- toward his other companions, prepared to trumpet his discovery.
Someone-Brandon? Bayard?-signaled frantically. There was something dreadfully wrong up there.
Then Robert heard the yowling issue from the fissure walls. He looked about him and saw over a dozen slick white things as they crawled, orange-eyed and hissing, from the rubble and the dust and from notches and holes in the stone.
"Mariel's cats!" he marveled. "By the gods, I was right!"
But this was no time for congratulating himself. Quickly he drew his sword and crouched, lantern held high in his left hand, his seasoned blade low in his other, but far too light to an experienced hand.
He looked down. His sword was broken.
Enid watched from above as the white forms crept closer to her father, wavering and wailing.
"What in the name of Hiddukel-" Andrew began.
"Enough speculation," Brandon announced flatly. "I'm going to kill them."
The first bolt from the bow sailed through the rippling mist and pinned one of the things to an overturned barrel. It screamed like a child, that shrill, rending sound of something skidding across glass. Two of the others lunged toward it, reducing it to bone with quick, ravenous tearing and chewing.
Brandon started. He moved away from the edge of the fissure, as though the ground he stood upon had become suddenly too hot.
"Get back here, damn you!" Enid said through clenched teeth, clutching the young Knight's arm. "Killing one doesn't stop the rest of them!"
Robert straddled the well cap, crouched in an old Solamnic battle stance. The cats flitted about him, between barrel and table and crate. He could not keep track of them, but the two that were feeding he could see quite clearly.
They were pale, hairless, with the skin of a grub or a rat's tail. Their ears were large, cupped, batlike, their orange eyes bulbous, too large.
Also too large were the fangs, as though lost in the subterranean darkness, the creatures had reverted to old generations, to the saber-toothed cats whose skulls miners and gravediggers found on occasion.
One of the creatures burst from a hole in the crevasse wall and hit the floor in stride, rushing at Robert, who raised the lantern in front of it.